How Visionwind Media started their web page design journey

Summary

Complete creative freedom to take the existing site elements and meld them into an authoritative, trust worthy, clean and easy to navigate homepage and site template. We are looking to you for your best inspirational ideas and creative designs. For complete information with links to our current site, please read the full description.

Company name

Dog Information

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

http://lowchensaustralia.com/sitemenu.htm is a authority dog information site with 1000+ pages full of great information that helps thousands of dog professionals, doctors, dog owners and dog lovers with questions about their pets. We seek to provide great content and now we need a great presentation.

While the site is full of great articles our site index (now used as the main navigation for the site http://lowchensaustralia.com/sitemenu.htm ) has become quite large and a bit overwhelming, we would like to take the elements from this index and have them integrated into a great, clean, and easy to navigate homepage design. This is an authoritative site, visited by many pet professionals, it needs to give the impression of being a trusted source of information, an authority but these are dogs afterall so there does have to be some play in the design.
As part of the this contest, we are looking to have a template created that continues the theme of this homepage throughout the site, but with less of the elements. Most of the pages on the site have articles that follow a format like this page: http://lowchensaustralia.com/health…isease.htm We will be taking your template and using it for all the article pages.
We really look forward to your feedback and please ask as many questions as you want, we want to give you any and all information we can to help you successfully create a great design.

Wants

- PSD File
- Keep in mind the site is static html and we plan to have a CSS file made (you are not responsible for making this) to update the design.
- A clean, easy to navigate design that doesn’t make the user think(they don’t wonder if a link or element can be clicked, they don’tguess what something is, they naturally click and know what to click). This is an informational site that needs to concisely present thevisitor with a clear path to get them the information they want. Thisis the primary focus of the template and homepage. It should feel aseffortless as possible to get to a section about dog grooming as it isto know where to click to find an article about which asprin is safefor dogs.
- Description of ARCTICLE PAGE TEMPLATE elements:http://www.visionwindmedia.com/proj…plate.html
- Description of HOMEPAGE elements:http://www.visionwindmedia.com/proj…epage.html
- Please focus on the HOMEPAGE template first, once we have this worked out, it can be applied to the article page, no sense in making extra work.
- The contest winner will be expected to have the HOMEPAGE template in layered PSD and show an example of this template applied to an article page, known at the ARTICLE PAGE TEMPLATE.- Sites I like:
- http://www.marthastewart.com/pets - nice top menu with categories and subcategories, really like the feel colors of this site as well as http://www.marthastewart.com in general, the template has good structure, there is a prominent search box (although I think it could be made to draw more attention)
- http://www.peteducation.com/ and http://www.youpet.com/ and http://dogtime.com/ - like the tab idea from the top menu and I like the top menu from http://www.peteducation.com/ but I don’t like the crowded upper left corner, it is cluttered and not necessary plus there is no universal search at the top.
- http://www.amazon.com and http://www.ebay.com and http://www.google.com - no I’m not looking to be any of these sites but I do like the search element of each, they clearly and prominently focus on the search box, especially amazon and google.
- http://www.about.com and http://dogs.about.com/ - they organize a huge amount of information nicely.
- http://www.petstyle.com/ - nice compact header
- http://www.greatdogsite.com/ - like the clean look
- http://dogtime.com/ - nice site
- http://www.petside.com/ - like the clean look

Don't want

- **Clutter and confusion** - this is the main purpose of the design contest, to clean up clutter and confusion.
- Overly cartoonish site, many pet professionals visit the site and it should be clear that this is an authority on the subject.
- Not too much emphasis on Australia (it can have some though if it works well with your design), while the site is named lowchensaustralia.com, australia is not the focus, good, quality dog information is the focus
- Please don't use our current logo, please just put a placeholder and only on the homepage, we are having a new logo designed, but it don't emphasize it, what I want to see on the article page template is a large fontface/graphic that says the section the user is in, for example "Dog Health" then has a much smaller "by lowchensaustralia.com" under it, if they click it, this will take the user back to the a main Dog Health page. Near this section graphic on the article page template should be a way to get back to the homepage such as the work "Home", clearly visible, this should also be on the home page.
- Items that should be ignored from the http://lowchensaustralia.com/sitemenu.htm page:
- Our Australia section
- Fun and Features section
- online tools section
- web rings section
- show stackers graphic and info
- oz show dogs community graphicYou can ignore the “site index” link that is now present on the top of the pages.